“After so long, I could not really miss my voice,” Sara EJCL tells BBC Access All. “When I first heard it again, I felt like crying. It’s a kind of miracle.”
The onset of motor neurone disease (MND) left Sara without voice and used her hands at the age of 34 years. This was the second time within months of her becoming her mother.
When they were growing up, her children Aviva and Eric ever heard her speaking with a emotionless robot voice through a machine.
But 25 years later, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has rebuilt his mother’s real voice with just eight seconds of audio on a scratch VHS tape.
The whole speaks to the BBC with a cutting technique – which uses a camera to track her eyes because she sees letters on a screen in front of her.
The sound of his small voice comes out.
The description of “Miracle” Sara began when the Bristol-based supporting technology company, Smartbox asked her for an hour-long audio to recreate their voice.
Sara and her now – the children hunted for some suitable – but Sara lost her voice in 2000 SMart phones were widespread use and before social media captured moments.
Eventually, an old VHS tape of Aviva was found as a child, shot at a family camcorder in the 1990s. But the picture was wobbly and the sound was distorted. People became mumbled in the shot and drowned with a banging TV.
Barely the eight seconds of Sara’s voice can be heard.
Sara ezelleSara was a lively London, who served as a personal assistant in publication when Jeevan took a turn.
Married to a child, the family was expecting another child. But Sara did not seem right. His speech had slowed down and he felt a weakness in his left hand.
Unexpectedly, he was detected MND, sometimes known as ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis).
The degenerative condition causes muscle weakness and, out of 1,000 people diagnosed in the UK every year, NHS says that most will lose the ability to speak.
MND affects men more, and may be a lifestyle, but it varies from person to another and some people live long life.
Sara says, “I was denying, thinking that I would be fine, but” after Eric’s birth, I deteriorated rapidly “.
Within months, Sara lost the use of her hands, then “all sensible speech”. Her marriage soon ended.
“I was very sad and nervous of disability and death,” she says. With two young children to take care, Sara had to rely on 24 -hour care.
Sara, sitting with Aviva and Eric, says, “It was difficult for my children to see strangers, but I am grateful.”
Unable to easily move or communicate, Sara fought with separation. She says that the first five years were spent in watching bad TVs, as their children had grown.
25 -year -old Eric says that her only memories are “to be paralyzed”, while 28 -year -old Aviva remembers that she realized that her mother was different.
“I just remember to ask her to prepare something strawberries, and she was not able to cut them. She had to ask someone.”
Sara ezelleFive years after her diagnosis, communication eventually open to Sara, with the advent of the eye gaze.
This meant that she could create words and sentences with eye movements – and speak, with a synthetic voice, like physicist Stephen Hawking.
Technology enabled him to be a volunteer and a lifetime patron for the MND Association, who wants to give technology to children and families so that they can communicate.
And she returned using eye monitoring techniques to create her passion, painting, original artifacts.
“I was very happy, even though it was laborious and tired,” she says.
In Bristol, despite asking for the value of an hour audio, Smartbox’s Simon Polay says that her heart sank when she got only eight seconds from VHS tape.
“I thought there is no way that we are going to be able to make a voice using audio,” they say.
But he still played with it, looting it through the latest technology from the international AI-Voise company, called XIlabs.
The company announced Rugby player worked for Rob Bur,
Sara ezelleFinally, Simon succeeded in setting Sara’s voice in addition to the sound of a bang TV using the eleven residents. But the result was thin, devoid of intimacy or personality, and it had an American lil.
So he turned to another app, where using thousands of voices, AI was trained to fill in the interval left by the isolator and to guess that a voice like Sara, where Sara, can go with its ingestion.
Eventually, Simon finished with several audio phrases, which he was happy – and sent them all.
She remembers how she told her that she had almost cried after hearing her new, old voice for the first time. And he was one of the old friends of Sara, someone who knew how he sounded, “It was influenced by how realistic it was”.
But how will Aviva and Eric react when they listen to it?
“It was amazing,” Aviva says. “I am still coming with it. Now hearing it in everyday life, it still surprises me.”
Sara’s new voice has also made the family closely, because Sara can now express emotions and can express her when she is happy, unhappy or angry. Eric says, “There is such a difference.”
“We can feel who he is as a person,” Aviva says. “Mam is not a disabled person in the corner with only one robot who is not related to him.”
The voices made by AI are a major improvement on old, computerized people – or by choosing from libraries of recorded voices – Dr. Susan Oman, an expert on data, Society at AI and Society at the University of Sheffield.
She says, “This is about you as a person, and you have a relationship with what you are.” “if that [the voice] If you don’t feel like you, you don’t feel like this. ,
She says that the protection of accents is also “really important” when technology can make them equal, she says.
“It cheats your class. It cheats your origin. People all over the world are trying to recover the accents and dialects that are lost.”
Sara joked that she sometimes remembers her old, synthetic voice. “I was very posh and people didn’t know that I was [really a] Cockney with a modest Lymp. ,
But she is happy to regain her old voice, she says. “I’m glad I’m coming back. It’s better than being a robot.”
